I recently discovered Icar, and am enjoying it, but a few things about its timeline puzzle me, and I could not find them addressed elsewhere. The major one is the Aran War. How can a war last 34,000 years? You might think that would be time enough to kill every man, woman and child, 34 times over, especially if high-tech weapons are involved (common nukes would be enough). It must have been a very, very, very low level war for a long time, with vast periods in which the two sides existed and still oppposed one another but could not or would not actively fight. Or maybe its exact duration is unkown and legendary. Thoughts?

Hi John, welcome to 1km1kt. I'm thrilled you like Icar. Thanks for your question about the Aran war. I've just noticed that the Icar page for the timeline was broken! Gah! I've fixed it now, so you can get more information about the Aran War.

Icar history began with me deciding that Icar should be set a long way into the future. Much further than most Sci Fi. I then filled in the gaps. I wanted there to be a reason for the Imperium not being terribly corrupt. I needed the Imperium to be benevolent and two methods came about - learning a lesson from before (the Aran War) and also because the human race is in dire straits (Droid War).

The Aran War went on for so long because of the distance involved. Wars in crampt places tend to be over much quicker than those spread out over a globe. Extrapolating that to the entire arm of the Milky Way means that war tends to take a long time to get going (300 years) and a long time to stop. As the factions increase in size, so do the number of reasons people go to war. Large distances mean that not every star system would be engulfed in a fury of fighting for the whole time. If a system was away from the centre of the galactic spiral or everyone on the system shared the same belief then the war for that location would be short.

Furthermore the war was not a holocaust. Not everyone was killed, the aim was to kill the idealists on the other side - which wasn't everyone.

When the human race left Earth, all the content they could take with them was digitised and stored. During the exodus, I imagine all of that information was copied and carried. History, after all, was precious.

Since then, there has been a lot of history. The more numerous the human race got and further it stretched across space, the more events happen. Billions of tiny scuffles, wars, trade embargoes, colonisations, overthrows, peacekeeping missions, corporate expansions/contractions and more. So much history - too much to keep in your own head. So, you pick up the events that have the most effect on the human populace.

At the moment, we (in the UK particularly) live in a surveillance culture. You could record everything we did and build a pretty good (and agnostic) picture of what went on. Icar's Imperium is not a surveillance culture. Freedom and privacy of the people is held absolutely - even if it means criminals get to move about more easily (which makes for a better RPG, of course).

It's also worth noting that humanity does not always need to record history accurately. If you imagine a colonial space craft landing on the planet for the first time, the desire to get a working colony up and running is great. There will be diarists but its unlikely that anyone will objectively cover what went on because everyone is building and working to improve the colony. That's just one example where history isn't always recorded.

The Imperium is very keen on retrieving history and keeping it as accurate as possible, including the bias caused by the weakness of humanity. It is very important that everyone in the Imperium understands that their role is vital - it must be done honestly and with the proviso that they are there to serve the human race as a whole.

Oh, and it's important to remember that when you're filling in 90000 years of history, you can't help but let a little bit of humour seep in. In this case, China annexing Luxembourg seemed like a very good idea.

Sorry to be a pain about this, but I think timeline needs some editing: In 3244 the first Genus two child is born on 1001. In 3232, several years earlier, the Genus War ends, before the birth of the first G2.

The screwy date problem keeps getting worse the further you read. You have the first colony leaving 1001 two years after FTL theory is invented.